The client was an FMCG manufacturer whose business was built on ice cream: a strong single product line, and all the exposure that comes with one. Ice cream is seasonal, competition was intensifying, and consumer tastes were fragmenting.

Their proposition was to enter the modern tea beverage market — an adjacent category with a young customer base, higher margin potential and, critically, year-round demand. The engagement was to establish whether that was a good idea, and if so, what would have to change inside the business for it to work.

The question is more interesting than it first appears. Entering a new category is not a marketing exercise; it touches supply chain, store operations, staffing, capital allocation and brand. Answering it properly means rebuilding how the business makes money, not just adding a product to the menu.

I worked as a Business Analyst across both halves of the engagement — the external industry research and the internal business assessment — and led the entry strategy in the final presentation.

This was a five-person team and the work was shared. I led approximately an hour of the final presentation covering the entry strategy and the operating model it implied; colleagues presented the supporting workstreams of pricing, branding, marketing and employee training. Those were team contributions, not mine.

The two halves of the engagement pointed in different directions, and reconciling them was the actual consulting work. The external research made the premium tier look attractive — rising spend, calmer competition than the crowded value segment, and a customer profile that matched the client's existing brand character.

The internal assessment made premium entry look difficult. A modest budget, a small planned store footprint, a single channel and a product whose appeal rested more on presentation than on taste are not the foundations of a premium play, where the entire proposition rests on ingredient quality and experience.

The research also flagged that the value and mid tiers, while more competitive, were growing considerably faster than premium — which meant abandoning them entirely to chase margin carried its own opportunity cost.

The engagement closed with a strategy presentation to the client. I led approximately an hour of it: the market position, the capability gap, and what would have to change in the business model and the operating process for entry to succeed.

The remaining workstreams — pricing, branding, marketing and employee training — were presented by colleagues. The value of splitting it that way is that each presenter had actually done the analysis they were defending, which matters the moment a client asks a follow-up question.

This project is where business capability modelling stopped being an academic framework for me and became a practical instrument. Running a capability assessment against a specific market position produces an uncomfortable, useful answer: not "are we good?" but "are we good enough for this, at this budget?" Those are very different questions, and only the second one is actionable.

It also taught me that the honest consulting answer is often not the exciting one. The premium tier was the attractive story and the analysis kept undercutting it. Presenting research that complicates the client's preferred direction — while still giving them something to act on — is a distinct skill from doing the analysis.

Sequencing mattered more than I expected. Doing the external work first gave the internal assessment a standard to measure against. Reversed, capability assessment becomes self-referential: you conclude the organisation is fine, because you never established what it needed to be fine at.

Finally, the presentation itself. An hour on transformation strategy in front of a client is a different discipline from writing it up — you cannot hide behind a document, and every claim has to be one you can defend when questioned.